Film Director

SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals features of the plot. Baltimore-born film director Barry Levinson has said his new eco-horror movie, "The Bay," about a Chesapeake Bay turned deadly by environmental abuse, is "80 percent factual. " Bay scientists and one activist who've seen it say the film, which opened Friday, does touch on some very real issues affecting the bay. But they say the artistic license taken with the facts and the gore that makes it a horror movie may overwhelm any back story about what's wrong with the Chesapeake.

Harvey G. Alexander, who founded and served as executive director of the Baltimore Film Festival and also read poetry on WBJC-FM, died Nov. 23 of pulmonary edema at Franklin Square Medical Center. He was 77. "I first got to know him in 1964 at Martick's. They wouldn't let me in, but I got to know him behind Martick's back in the alley," said film director and writer John Waters. "Harvey was an eccentric intellectual and a real bohemian, but always very friendly," said Mr. Waters.

MARBELLA, Spain -- Film director Jean Negulesco, 93, a Romanian whose films included "How to Marry a Millionaire" and "Three Coins in a Fountain" died here Sunday of heart failure and will be buried tomorrow in this Mediterranean coastal resort town where he lived since the late 1960s.Born Feb. 29, 1900, in Craiova, Romania, he came to the United States in 1927.His last directing credit was "The Invisible Six" in 1970. His first movie credit was "Singapore Woman" in 1941. He was known initially for his hard-hitting romantic melodramas, but critics disparaged much of his later work.

SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals features of the plot. Baltimore-born film director Barry Levinson has said his new eco-horror movie, "The Bay," about a Chesapeake Bay turned deadly by environmental abuse, is "80 percent factual. " Bay scientists and one activist who've seen it say the film, which opened Friday, does touch on some very real issues affecting the bay. But they say the artistic license taken with the facts and the gore that makes it a horror movie may overwhelm any back story about what's wrong with the Chesapeake.

Stephen M. Milius, an award-winning film director and editor who directed hundreds of commercials and corporate videos during his nearly 25-year career, died Monday from complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.Milius, who was 48 and lived in Owings Mills, was awaiting a lung transplant when he died.Since 1993, Mr. Milius had been associated with Big Shot Productions in Baltimore, where he planned and directed a variety of videos and films, including commercials, corporate-industrial training videos and infomercials.

John Schlesinger broke the mold.The portly, pugnacious British film director, a recent visitor to Washington to plug his new film, has once again insisted on confounding critics and citizens alike, going his own way, smashing all precedent, and parting company absolutely with his peers and acolytes.And what mold is that?Why, it's the mold originally set by Alfred Hitchcock, and followed more or less intact by other great Brits, such as Sir Carol Reed, Sir David Lean, Tony Richards and later by another generation, including Ridley and Tony Scott, Michael Apted and so forth.

Harvey G. Alexander, who founded and served as executive director of the Baltimore Film Festival and also read poetry on WBJC-FM, died Nov. 23 of pulmonary edema at Franklin Square Medical Center. He was 77. "I first got to know him in 1964 at Martick's. They wouldn't let me in, but I got to know him behind Martick's back in the alley," said film director and writer John Waters. "Harvey was an eccentric intellectual and a real bohemian, but always very friendly," said Mr. Waters.

Christine Pascal,42, an actress and film director who made her movie acting debut at 21 and directed her first film at 25, has died, her husband's production agency said yesterday. The agency, Armedia, founded by Ms. Pascal's husband, Richard Boner, did not give the cause of her death, which it said occurred late Friday or early Saturday. Ms. Pascal began her film career in 1974 and directed her first film four years later. She won the 1992 Louis Delluc Prize for directing "Le Petit Prince a Dit" ("The Little Prince Said")

Robert Bresson, 98, a film director who helped redefine French cinema by focusing on images rather than dialogue, died Saturday in Paris. He was best known for his austere approach and helping pave the way for the New Wave movement.The son of a military officer who once studied to be a painter, he often used untrained actors and coached them to speak in monotones. In the 1959 film "Pickpocket," widely regarded as his best film, Mr. Bresson pared down the compulsive art of lifting wallets to its barest psychological elements.

Carlo Pietrangeli, 82, an archaeologist whose 17-year tenure as head of the Vatican Museums culminated with the restoration the Sistine Chapel, died yesterday. Despite a long illness, he had continued in his post as director-general of the museums, where Michelangelo's frescoed ceiling graces the chapel. He was appointed to the top museum post in 1978 by Pope John Paul I.Atef el-Tayeb, 47, a film director who was part of the new realism trend in Egyptian cinema, died yesterday in Cairo after heart surgery.

With a James Bond party theme, it was no wonder the Hyatt Regency ballroom looked like a movie set. The room was swagged in white chiffon, with clusters of white couches and cube tables along the sides. Red velvet ropes cordoned off the back third of the room, which was elevated for the VIP section. "There's a bottle of vodka on every table here," said real estate developer Patrick Turner, noting the VIP bottle service. No set would be complete without its stars. And there were plenty, thanks to host Baltimore Ravens player Terrell Suggs.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity. In the attention-getting plot, two straight men agree to have sex for the camera in order to win at Seattle's annual home-made porn festival, HUMP! - or, as it's called in the movie, Humpfest. At the end of each festival, the emcee, sex columnist Dan Savage, hands out awards and burns the offerings onstage. Director Lynn Shelton's observation of manly competition and fellow feeling lifts the blatant plot hook into funnier, more mysterious realms of human behavior.

With Standard Operating Procedure (opening today at the Charles), Errol Morris, who helped start America's documentary revolution with such celebrated films as The Thin Blue Line (1988), investigates a subject that already has, in his words, "a lot of fingerprints on it." He explores the physical and psychological torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, brought to light four years ago by a stream of abhorrent photographs. Morris persevered despite his knowledge that other print and movie journalists were laboring on the story, confident that his highly personal and idiosyncratic approach would produce unexpected results.

M. CARROLL RAVER, writer, photographer, cinematographer and film director, died Monday April, 9th. He was 67. A native of Carroll County, Md., he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he was a National Collegiate Athletic Association champion fencer. Early in his career, while at J. Walter Thompson Advertising (NY), he served as a copywriter, producer and director working on television commercials for national clients including Ford. Later, as an award-winning director and cameraman, he directed commercials for Hertz, General Motors, the U.S. Army, BMW and others.

A celebrated writer doesn't always have the makings of a writer-director. Steven Zaillian earned his reputation as a screenwriter with Schindler's List, but as a writer-director his work is often clumsy or simplistic; even at the script stage, it's as if he's writing down to his limited powers as a film director, or else, as a director, is not getting whatever life or complexity he has on the page. In Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), his writing-directing debut, Zaillian sheared away the fascinating, complicated mesh of real-life characters in Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book about being the parent of a chess prodigy, and constructed a hollow fairytale about the need to lead a free, well-rounded life.

HOLLYWOOD / / Long before the summer thriller snakes on a plane slithers into theaters in july, potentially venomous fans started rattling. The film's title says everything you need to know about the plot: On a trans-Pacific flight, a Hawaiian mobster trying to eliminate a protected witness uncorks a carton of poisonous serpents. But as Web sites posted details during pre-production and shooting last summer, B-movie fans began to react. They wanted more creative snake attacks, more gore, more nudity and more of star Samuel L. Jackson's signature four-syllable f-bombs.

With a James Bond party theme, it was no wonder the Hyatt Regency ballroom looked like a movie set. The room was swagged in white chiffon, with clusters of white couches and cube tables along the sides. Red velvet ropes cordoned off the back third of the room, which was elevated for the VIP section. "There's a bottle of vodka on every table here," said real estate developer Patrick Turner, noting the VIP bottle service. No set would be complete without its stars. And there were plenty, thanks to host Baltimore Ravens player Terrell Suggs.

David Schaffer Epstein, 73, a film director and screenwriter, died after a heart attack Tuesday in Connecticut. He had directed educational films and documentaries on many political and public-affairs issues, including atomic energy, the creation of Israel as a state and the post-war reconstruction of Eastern Europe. As the liaison between the Ford Foundation and the "Omnibus" series on CBS television, he directed and produced films on Frank Lloyd Wright, the Quincy Adams family and other subjects.

How do you tell the story of 800,000 deaths in 100 days without making a movie too horrific to bear? That is the challenge director Raoul Peck faced in making the HBO film Sometimes in April, which chronicles the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 as hard-line members of the Hutu majority slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The blood bath lasted more than three months while the world looked on but offered little help. Peck, who scored a triumph with HBO's Lumumba in 2002, masterfully combines a visual style of harsh realism to communicate the horror, with an elegiac tone and poetic sensibility that seeks to redeem it. The result is an epic that stirs the soul with its story of the dignity and suffering of those who survived, even as it staggers the imagination with the catalog of brutality that they witnessed.

More than three decades ago, Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song opened eyes in Hollywood, not only introducing a uniquely African-American viewpoint to American movies, but making a ton of money while doing so. That film, which by some estimates cost only $150,000 to make and brought in more than 100 times that at the box office, opened the door for movies steeped in the gritty urban experience of many African-Americans. It led to a genre -- blaxploitation -- where hard times were the rule, oppression the coin of the realm and survival, against a society where the odds are decidedly not in the hero's favor, the only goal.